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This is the second part of a two-article series on a way to support Leadership Development that is radically effective, gives any organization an instant competitive advantage, and costs little.

In a previous post I described the difference between “flat” learning (shorter-term, skills-based, cognitive, discrete, disconnected) and “vertical” (longer-term, deep and unifying, all-encompassing). I noted that vertical learning leads you to form increasingly sophisticated understandings of yourself and the world, which in turn help you handle complexity. The world is complex, it goes without saying. And leadership challenges get increasingly complex as you move up the ladder, so to prepare people for them, investment in vertical learning makes sense. I also noted that we’re all slowly growing on this deep, meaningful level, anyway–especially if we’re in challenging roles–so the trick is not so much to conceive of and shoehorn a wholly new and foreign way of learning into a workplace ecosystem: supporting vertical development just means you find ways to amplify, reinforce, improve, intensify, or engage healthy processes that are already there.

What would it look like to improve vertical learning at work? Here’s a recipe.

Assess in a Topic Area: Decision-Making

It’s a principle of improvement that if you can see how you’re doing, you can improve faster: this “seeing how you’re doing” is, of course, assessment. Advanced assessments emerging in recent years can give us a sense of where we are on the life-long track of vertical learning; known as “developmental” assessments, these tools feel different than other tests: they use open-ended questions, or a guided conversation, to lead you to talk about the world, and they look for deep structures in your thinking that are visible through the way you talk about things. One of my favorite of these assessments is the Subject Object Interview, which can tell you your level of development according to Robert Kegan’s scale of ego development. But the assessment I am thinking of for leadership development is a different one: it’s the Lectical Decision-Making Assessment (LDMA), created by a spunky nonprofit specializing in developmental assessment: Lectica. The LDMA uses open-ended questions to measure your vertical level in the context of decision-making, according to the much-researched “Lectical Scale” of hierarchical complexity. Why this particular content area? There are other ways to approach leadership: through ethics or reflective judgment, for instance. The advantage of decision-making is that is it as once practical and deep: decision-making is perhaps themost important facet of leadership; after all, making decisions is what leaders do. So getting better at it pays dividends immediately; but it is also a rich terrain of philosophical inquiry, drawing on a complex expanse of ideas, concepts, and frames of meaning, so it’s a fruitful context for working through the layers of ambiguity and complexity that you will encounter as you progress on the vertical dimension.

Make that Assessment an Embedded, Formative Assessment

So now we have a way to assess your vertical level in the topic area of decision-making. But we need to do more than assess your level; we need to think of that assessment as part of a regular, ongoing learning process. We need to commit to working on improving in vertical learning over a long term period (say, of years). For one thing, that’s the time scale of change in vertical learning; for another, if we can commit to investing a little time, then we get two special gifts: first, we can use the assessment regularly to show us how well we are progressing; that makes it an “embedded” part of the learning process. But more importantly, we can use the data from the assessment to directlyhelp us progress. The LDMA, for instance, tells us how we are thinking now, but it also tells us how we are about to think. Because it is built on a scale of increasing complexity that extends well beyond anyone besides Einstein, the LDMA knows what’s coming for us. Importantly, it doesn’t obscure this knowledge: it openly describes the next step on our path in a way that’s accessible to us, and even intriguing. Using an assessment this way is “formative.” The LDMA makes its formative use particularly easy by going one step further. It offers individualized learning recommendations targeted to our learning level, from articles and books to specific hands-on activities.

Add Back Some “Flat” Learning

So we have a long term commitment to learning, and an assessment that both tells us where we are on the level of vertical development in decision-making and helps us see and work towards the next step. That’s a lot already; but we can add more. We started this article by making a distinction between “flat,” skills-based, short-term learning, and vertical development. But in truth there is no real reason to exclude flat, shorter-term learning just because we’re working on vertical; in fact, the two go together. In whatever context we work in, there is a constellation of key skills used on a regular basis that you might reasonably want to work on as you gain in experience–and you might address these skills in a sequence of short bursts of learning. This, in fact, is the approach of most Leadership Development programs. The LDMA recognizes the value of a combined approach and identifies a handful of skills important in decision-making, among them: communicative capacity, perspective taking, perspective seeking, perspective coordination, argumentation, and decision-making process. It assesses them at the same time it assesses your vertical level: this adds an additional dimension to the assessment; now we’re not just assessing your growth at the deep, vertical level, but we have some focused, practical skills related to that growth that we can also work on simultaneously.

So now we have a lot of data: in the domain of decision-making, we’re looking at how we’re doing at deep levels of vertical development, and we’re tracking how well we do in a variety of relevant associated skills, any one of which might have been the centerpiece of any other leadership development program. We also have a list of resources and activities we might undertake as part of our learning. The challenge now becomes mining the data for the parts that are most relevant to us, and thinking about what to do. We’re looking, in other words, for our growth edge: the individualized, deeply personal part of our learning that seems most compelling and rewarding to us. How we frame and think about this will be different for everyone; but the point for everyone is to design some activities that would activate or instantiate or explore that learning edge: research, real-world engagement, experiments, conversations. These activities we will frame as short term, iterative learning projects. Lectica’s way of modeling these is helpful: they use the acronym “VCoL,” or Virtuous Cycles of Learning, to describe the components of successful learning activities: for each, you should make sure you’re engaging in a fully-formed process that starts with a goal, seeks information, applies it, reflects, and sets a subsequent new goal. We’re creating a process, that, if it works, can continue indefinitely; in fact, a Lectical assessment is designed to give you a year’s worth of data to unpack and explore in this way.

One key point: the design and implementation of these individualized learning sequences happens in the normal ebb and flow of life and work–it’s not something that requires an off-site–it therefore avoids the well-known problem of learning transfer, and it’s immediately effective. The workplace effectively becomes the place of learning, supported by the use of the assessment, and under the guidance of a coach. Which brings me to my next point.

Use a Coach

Does all of this sound like a lot? It is. Processing the rich data from the LDMA, considering how it reflects your life and work, comparing what you’re learning there to what you’re seeing elsewhere in your life, looking for central themes that can evolve into your growth edge, identifying ways to design VCoLs that instantiate the learning in meaningful and practical ways, implementing and following up on those VCoLs: that’s a lot to do on your own, while you still have a job to do and a life to live, and an even bigger job if you you’re new to the ideas of vertical learning, VCoL design, decision-making, formative assessment, and so on. For that reason, I think you’ll do better with a coach: someone ideally very familiar with the assessment you’ll be using, expert at identifying growth edges, comfortable with designing personalized learning around those growth edges, familiar with what it takes to implement an iterative sequence of personalized learning activities, and able to help you make sense of everything. Fortunately, coaching with the LDMA is similar to other developmental coaching (like Immunity to Change, for example), and Lectica provides coaching certification training, so there is a rich pool of coaches available to draw from.

Instant Competitive Advantage: But at What Cost?

Assessing regularly with a developmental assessment; using that assessment in an embedded, formative way; mining the data to develop and implement personalized learning activities in your context; and working with a coach: these are the key components of what I think make a remarkably robust and, really, revolutionary way to support vertical development of leadership. There is very little extant in the workplace that can compare in terms of the learning enabled: this approach has such dramatic potential to increase an individual’s ability to lead, I see it as an immediate competitive advantage for any organization that undertakes it. But what is the cost? Let’s think about that for a minute. The cost of the assessments is minimal; Lectica is a nonprofit committed to keeping costs low; so the investment is essentially the time invested and the cost of the coach. If we imagine a coach working with you every few weeks for a year; at, say, 20 sessions of an hour each, we’re looking at something like $2,000 – 3,000 per person; at scale it’s cheaper. A coach working full time might manage 40 or 50 program participants, for example, as well as perform some administrative and reporting duties (reporting on the progress of the program, for instance).

Alternative: Use A Developmental Assessment With Your Leadership Development Program

Maybe hiring a coach full time or paying $2,000 as in individual feels like a lot. Maybe you already have an active, successful leadership development program that you don’t want to throw out! If this is the case, there are alternatives. One is to continue to use your program to focus on the identified skills you deem important to leadership in your context, and to supplement it with the LDMA, or other developmental assessments, to begin to add a component that supports vertical learning. Doing so has a lot of advantages. Among them: you’ll only be paying the price of the assessments themselves; they can serve as objective assessments of what is being learned in your leadership program; and, because they are designed for a variety of contexts and topics, one or more of them will likely touch on whatever skills you are specifically targeting, and so help reinforce those skills in a formative way.

I want to contrast a couple of ways to think about learning; one that informs much of what we do, and another that I think ought to inform more of what we’re doing. The first way is to think of learning as flat, linear, time-limited, and cognitive. The second is another way to think of learning as vertical, longitudinal, all-encompassing, and continuous.

In the “flat” model, learning is essentially a two-step process: ingest information, and then, sort of magically, learn. The emphasis in the learning design and assessment is on the definition, provision, organization, and repetition of the information. Less emphasis is placed on what the learner does with that information, or on the larger contexts in which the learning happens. Learning is seen as happening in discrete, isolated bursts: a course, a workshop, a webinar. Little thought is given to how these bursts connect with the person living through them. This learning is, as it were, shallow, or almost extrinsic: it’s not really expected to penetrate to the core of the individual and change the way they understand themselves or the world, for example.

In the “vertical” model, the bursts of flat learning are still there: but they are understood to be playing out against the backdrop of a deeper, more meaningful, longitudinal change in the individual, one that encompasses all their faculties: cognition, yes, but also emotion, motivation, behavior, self-understanding, mindset, and so on. In this model growth isn’t measured in terms of external content, but rather in deep, intrinsic, qualitative changes, increased ability to handle complexity, new ways to make meaning: and these changes percolate through and connect all the aspects of the person, ultimately appearing as long term behavior change. This learning is at a deeper level: learning here registers specifically as changes in understanding the self and the world.

The flat model has advantages: it is discrete, convenient, seems measurable, feels professional, fits into systems. And it works for a lot of things. But it is also imperative to understand the deeper learning that is going on. Some challenges cannot be solved by anyone without a particular level of vertical development; no amount of “flat” learning alone will address them. Among them are the particular challenges of leadership.

As you move up the hierarchical ladder of leadership roles, you are increasingly called on to display sophisticated understandings of the complexity of the world. Content or particular technical skills in discrete processes are helpful, of course, but what becomes more and more necessary is the ability to marshal your own and others’ full faculties–including motivation, emotion, cognition, behaviors–build systems of meaning across disciplines, and construct ways to understand and make decisions in emergent, ambiguous, and diverse contexts.

This vertical development often slowly happens in the background in life; we sense it happening, especially as we look back over where we’ve been and think about the ways we used to understand things. It explains a lot of tension between people in the workplace: that between workers expecting direction, and managers expecting initiative, for instance. Just working in leadership roles and making your way through the succession of problems you face there is a kind of support of this longitudinal, qualitative development. But that’s an inefficient and unpredictable support. As with any process, it can be improved with reflection, self-awareness, consistency, and by looking for ways to “see into” what is going on. You can manage and track vertical growth in people and teams as you already manage any other workplace system. And the overhead is minimal.

So how do you “see into” and more efficiently support this necessary growth in your leaders? That I’ll talk about in my next post! But here’s the short answer: a very special kind of formative assessment paired with a more-than-lip-service culture of learning or reflective practice. And a coach.

I was reflecting on a social media post by a successful IT leader the other day; it was a list of his rules to live and work by. He had talked about them enough over the course of his career that people had asked him to write them down. (As an aside, I’ve found other cases of people asking leaders to codify their life instructions; it seems to be a fairly common event.)

These particular guidelines were very good; the work of a thoughtful, caring, dedicated colleague and leader. Things anyone wise would take to heart. My own reaction centers not on what the guidelines said but on the way the guidelines came about. Upon their genesis, which seems arbitrary.

In any group of humans working together a set of rules develops over time that define who we are and what we do. How we talk to each other, who gets more authority, what skills are valued, what behaviors are off-limits, etc. You might say these rules exist on a kind of consciousness continuum. Some are visible: talked about, written down, and even posted on a wall, like an office sign that says “no smoking.” But most rules are invisible. We don’t talk about them much, nor do we write them down, and they may not even be thought about consciously. These hidden rules are perhaps the more powerful and meaningful rules, and they are not always pretty. They might contradict more visible rules, or otherwise be something you aren’t particularly proud to say out loud. For example, one deeper rule might be “we actually do smoke; we just do it when the boss is out, and we open the windows and turn on the fan to hide the fact.”

One of my interests has long been to help make these deeper rules visible, discussable, and changeable. To give people the conscious tools to acknowledge and adjust (if they wish) their workplace culture, improve their interpersonal relations, even revise their own deeply personal decision-making.

That’s why the IT leader’s list caught my eye. His list is his way of saying “these are the rules I think we should follow” or “let’s change the rules to these.” This move is good in a lot of ways: our leader is perceptive enough to sense what is going on around him; he is reflective and imaginative enough to think about how things ought to be; he sees the world as a place that can be improved (plastic in the original sense, of “moldable”); he thinks he and his colleagues have the power to make changes; his proposed rules are in the service of improving the lives of others; by making a list, he shows that he knows there are rules; etc. All good.

And what would be better still, although admittedly harder, would be to engage the other members of the organization in the creation of such a set of rules. To invite them into a space where they could contribute in the perception, acknowledgement, and adjustment of the way they worked together. If one person on their own has good ideas about how to fix things, wouldn’t more people have better ideas still? If you could get your colleagues productively engaged, a lot of benefits would accrue, among them two key ones: you might get their buy-in to helping you enact the new rules thereafter, and you might empower them to keep on talking about and improving cultural rules forever. Which is probably the ultimate goal: to leave behind a culture that has the tools to continually improve itself.

Getting more people involved is easier said than done, I admit. Why? Well, one of the most important rules is like the movie Fight Club: we don’t talk about the rules. Our identities and social status are wrapped up in them as they are. If we mess with the rules, it’s not clear what will happen. If I am to start being honest about what needs to improve, for example, things might come up that I don’t want to change. Maybe I will be asked to get better, and maybe I won’t be able to! Very scary. Power dynamics also have a rule-reinforcing effect: we are, in general, famously reluctant to tell our supervisors what we are really thinking and feeling, and vice versa. Easy to get a group of reports to talk candidly about the rules of their relationship with their boss if she is not in the room. Harder to get to the same level of honesty with her there. But a level of semi-radical openness is what you need to surface and rewrite the rules.

The IT leader might be the only person in his organization who can safely produce a list of rules as he did. The worst case scenario for him is that his staff may politely ignore his list. There is rather more risk for a person at a lower organizational level to spontaneously propose changes like these.

Having said all this, it’s not too late for this leader’s list. You could use it, once made, to open up a conversation, even if you hadn’t involved people theretofore. It could itself be the entry into engagement; if you could get interested staff in a room, put them at ease, and build some trust, you might ask them what they felt about the IT leader’s guidelines. Which resonated with them, which didn’t, etc. You might get them to articulate one or two rules they felt were important in their own lives and work. You might get them to think about what role unspoken rules play in their organization. And so you might have the start of an effective rule-changing conversation that could both help you improve things in the short term and build the skills in the staff to continue improving things in perpetuity.

Abraham Maslow studied self-actualized people–highly evolved people, you might say, advanced in their thinking, sophisticated in their humanity, expressive, expansive, generous, loving, confident, healthy, gifted, alert–and what made them special. In particular he focused on the way they perceived.

He thought they knew things in a different way, which he called B-Cognition, short for Being-Cognition. In B-Cognition, the individual perceives the object as if the individual were part of the object. A loving, universalizing, interrelated way of knowing. Knowing the object so well that you discover in it yourself, or links to yourself, and through those links, you intuit more links–to everything.

A way of looking or knowing that encompasses the object’s existence and your own existence and so is also a kind of being, hence the name. A way of knowing that radiates love, joy, contentedness, acceptance, appreciation, forgiveness to those in contact with the individual.

The great people manage to exist in B-Cognition; the rest of us get in there now and then: in the process of artistic creation, listening to music, in meditation or in mindful moments, walking in the woods, in a moment of “flow,” or generally, in moments of being teased out of routine cares by things.

Maslow distinguishes B-Cognition from D-Cognition, which we all use all the time, to my everlasting chagrin. This is Deficit-Cognition, perceiving in a way that separates the looker from the looked-at. Judging, categorizing, assigning relative value, assessing relevance, bracketing off, determining usefulness or beauty, investigating logical truth, etc.

D-Cognition is the lens through which we see each other and the world: “To what extent is this thing useful to me?” we are asking at some level every time we perceive anything. Or perhaps the question we ask ourselves has another form, too, coming from a position of anxiety: “Will this thing impede or injure me? Expose a vulnerability?”

If you pay attention to the flicker of thought in your mind and in the faces of others as you meet them in the street or in the office (imagine doing this!), you’ll see D-Cognition at work. Instantaneous judgements and rankings and assessments and associated thoughts and anxieties well up with every glance, no matter how fleeting.

I think D-Cognition is basically the only perceptory apparatus of the workplace, which is logical, I suppose, because the prevailing idea at work is that we are practical, efficient, and attuned to the bottom line, and we need to judge, judge, judge, judge. Or be judged.

In aesthetic and academic circles I think there might be a little more room for B-Cognition. A scholar writing about Wordsworth, for instance (I picked him on purpose!), I hope, is (or was at some point) motivated by a B-Cognition-like experience of (or with) the text. Of course she then writes about it and has to defend her writing against other scholars and other interpretations and in creeps D-Cognition.

Maslow’s study of perception connects with other similarly-oriented ways of thinking. My personal saint and philosopher, Henri Bergson, always sought “pure perception,” for instance, which was to be achieved by intuition, a penetrative, organic, knowing-from-within, like B-Cognition. I remember writing in my Master’s thesis decades back about the experience of using intuition on a text and hypothesizing that at some point down in the trenches of that perception you were seeing yourself or seeing an interplay between yourself and the text that changed both. Some kind of quantum effect.

B-Cognition is also a good way to describe the goal of mindfulness and meditation, very popular now (and deservedly so) in our frazzled, overloaded, hyper-material, people-argue-with-each-other-on-TV, tabloid-y culture. These activities, coming out of the Buddhist tradition, focus your attention to your inner experience of life in the moment; and one of the key points, as you come to know yourself, is to come to know yourself as existing in a kind of suspension of selves, one big oneness. Mindfulness chips away at the unhealthy personal and interpersonal effects of D-Cognition and aims to get you to the place where you can radiate in all directions the kind of contentedness and love that Maslow’s modern Buddhas did.

B-Cognition and mindfulness also align with Constructive Developmental Psychology, which I’ve mentioned a few times, and in particular with the fabulous 5th stage of Robert Kegan’s hierarchy of epistemological sophistication. This is the stage where your interest in being a “self” fades and you begin to take very seriously other selves and relations between selves. You laugh happily at your own fallibilities, which you would never do if you were trying to keep your you-ness intact. And of course they align with all those wonderful, inscrutable, contradictory, healing messages from thinkers and artists working along the same lines. Walt Whitman, of course. Maybe something in the Cubists. Etc.

I like the path Maslow took — starting with a psychological investigation more or less according to the way of Western science (although feeling perhaps more like archaeology than psychology?), he ended up confirming what he was seeing by drawing similar connections to thought in non-western-scientific containers: religion, philosophy, aesthetics, literature.

One last point that I think is key. In B-Cognition, we have the data of D-Cognition, plus much more. It is not that we suddenly lose our ability to discern or to think; B is not intellectually inferior to D. Those D-data are all there, but contextualized, re-membered, put back together, held together with contradictory information, resolved, understood in a different way by an epistemology at a higher order of complexity. A small piece replaced in a big puzzle.

For myself I’m about getting more B-Cognition to the people. At work, in life. On a personal level, on a local level, on a national level. B-Cognition of others, and maybe more importantly, of themselves. Appreciation of B-Cognition. Restitution of wholeness and relatedness in the deconstructed and compartmentalized lives of people.

Lately I’ve been saying that you should cultivate learning in your organization as you might manage an ecological resource, like a forest, or any other complex system of high priority (like your computer network or your budget). As if learning were a “cognitive enterprise infrastructure” or worked like a kind of water cycle. But how would you do that, and what would it be like, and how would it be different than what you do when you think of your workplace as a kind of machine that consistently produces material stuff? I am not totally sure, but here I take a guess at nine possible pieces of an ecology of workplace learning.

Cultivate Development, Rather Than Manage Performance. The point is not to manage people’s performances, but rather to get them to develop as much as they can, on the assumption that more highly evolved people do better things. The annual performance review that tracks behaviors against rather limited metrics and has a kind of binary output (wrong or OK) here evolves into something more like a coaching relationship in an experiential context: growth is the focus, not proscription. You look for activities that are motivating to the individual, that are a bit out of their comfort zone, yes, and you expect to support them in iterative cycles of trying things out, reflecting, adapting, and trying them out again. And you might add a variety of unheard-of supports and activities to help people think and reflect and be aware of themselves in a variety of dimensions, drawing on things from personality styles assessments to mentoring relationships to counseling-like activities, such as item 2, below. The trick is that these things, that we kinda do now in a knee-jerk way, awayfrom work, would be more like the work.

Support Cognitive Development. According to the work of Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey (whom I talk about a lot), we evolve through a series of increasingly sophisticated ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us. That is, we can so develop, if given the right environment. And with this increased epistemological sophistication comes a better ability to deal with and thrive in complex environments. One such complex environment is the increasingly global, flat, multi-cultural, resource-starved, post-ideological, environmentally-challenged, a-traditional, scary world of today. To help people be effective in this kind of world requires activities that help us know differently; Kegan and Lahey’s Immunity to Change coaching process is one such structure. Having done it myself, I am amazed by its ability to make you reinvent the way you think about yourself and the world in which you engage; I fairly salivate to try it with a team of colleagues in a workplace. The downside? It’s an intensive, six-month process of bi-weekly meetings, invoking much deep personal questioning; that’s a huge investment. But in an ecology of workplace learning, invest in people iswhat you do: no rain means no rivers means no seas means no evaporation means no rain, etc.

Assess Development in New Ways. In Higher Education we try to assess student learning, and it’s a challenge. But we don’t even try to assess faculty and staff learning; and the generic workplace doesn’t generally assess staff learning, either. But we should. To promote development over production, we have see where this development is happening, individually and in teams. Of course it gets tricky: it’s easy to see your behaviors, but how do you see what’s going on behind the behaviors? Fortunately there are new kinds of tools that have potential in this regard: things like the Developmental Testing Service’s reflective judgment assessments, such as their test of managerial decision-making, which asks you to analyze complex, asymmetrical workplace problems, assesses you according to a complex scale of cognitive development rooted in Kurt Fischer’s work, and gives you (you yourself, the test taker!) rich feedback about your strengths and ways in which you can improve, data which feeds right back into the coaching relationship I mention above.

Represent the Learning Ecosystem. If you’re going to try to manage an ecosystem, you need some kind of a representation of it. As the water cycle has its famous circular chart with arrows and the budget has its classic representations in profit/loss statements and balance sheets, so does the learning system have something. I don’t know what it will look like, exactly; but I imagine it will be something like the famous Kellogg Logic Model, which the well-known foundation suggests you use to understand your various high-stakes interventions, and which helps you see programmatic inputs, outputs, assessments, changes. With a key difference: the effect of your ecology isn’t an output external to you, it’s an evolution of your ecology. So a learning logic model would show as its characteristic feature a looping back upon its constantly changing self.

Analyze How We Work; Analyze Our Culture. Part of learning is seeing yourself learn. That may be the single biggest difference between a learning organization and a producing organization: the learning organization sees itself and not just the things it makes. We will need to learn to pay attention not just to the products of our culture but to our culture, not just to the deliverable of the project, but to the way we work together on the project. For that a lot of tools exist already, like various kinds of post-activity group reflection encouraged in psychologically safe spaces, that let anyone share their experiences along the way. But new tools will help: the same sort of analytics thinking that has been transforming everything around us can help transform how we work together: social and network analyses to show us how we engage, corpus-linguistics analyses on the big data of our communications and cultural artifacts; these will help us, too, to see the patterns that make up our togetherness.

Assign Staff to Cultivate Learning. Of course you can’t really have a garden without a gardener. And all the network analysis and group reflection exercises you might want to use won’t be that helpful unless it’s somebody’s job to watch learning in the organization at a meta level: to gather relevant data, assess its meaning, and help the group understand where it’s going. The teacher, if you will, of the organization. This would be a new thing: we’re used to thinking of Chief Information Officers, Chief Information Security Officers, Chief Executive Officers: this would be a Chief Learning Officer. Although of course it needs to be more than one person. And of course everyone has to be involved. But still the CLO might help organize it all. How much of your people resources should you put into learning, CLO and everything else thrown in? I propose 20% as a start. But I suspect it should be more, maybe up to 50%. Maybe 63%.

Find New Ways to Gather and Share Ideas.Which Means Liking Them. One of the most important things in your organization are the ideas in people’s minds. The business world is just beginning to learn that to be relentlessly innovative, they have to gather and tend ideas in new ways, because ideas are the seed of innovation, be these ideas from their staff, their customers, their partners, their competitors. (See my last post for more on this). Part of this idea-tending requires a real cultural change–towards the acceptance and collective cultivation of ideas–and away from the general distrust of all things new that naturally grows up in an organization designed to perform consistently. Let me say that again: we will have to learn to like each other’s ideas. And treat them, as it were, like a community resource, like, as it were, children. Because without them growing and maturing, we’ll fail. Businesses are starting to do this by building open, inclusive, idea-participation systems called Ideation Engines or Idea Stock Markets that aim to make the ideas in the group transparent and collectively developed. But I suspect you can go a long way without a particularly unique tool (a shared spreadsheet might work as well).

Create Loops and Groups. In my perhaps over-simplified way of thinking, learning comes down to loops (in that feedback and reflection are crucial) and groups (in that learning is social; and in that your co-learners are as important for your learning as your own mind). So I think much of the key work of the Chief Learning Officer and her team will boil down to finding or building, and supporting, new sorts of groups in which people are desirous of learning together, and in adding “loops” to existing processes, to work reflection into the fabric of the organization.

Do Some Old-School Ethnography. I am continually amazed by the complexity and mystery of people and of organizations. And by the fact that all you need to do to begin seeing and unravelling (or ravelling) the mystery is to observe people and ask questions (of course taking notes and writing down the answers). This is the way anthropologists settled on coming to know things as complex and mysterious as entire alien (to them) cultures. Libraries and IT departments have recently begun seeing that ethnography helps them understand the mysterious complexities of cultures alien to them, too (their customers). And it will work for you. On a certain level you can see an ethnographically-inclined research project as a kind of mirror to the people (if its results are shared with the people it studies), a loop at a high level, that both honors people and lets them see what’s going on. I think a lot about the emphasis in the popular Reggio Emilia model on the artful documentation of what the learners are doing; an ethnographic approach to your own organization is like that.

If you agree with us that the time has come to cultivate learning in our organizations in a systematic, holistic way, as a kind of cognitive enterprise infrastructure—you may be interested in some other opportunities:

The Learning Organization Academy (LOA). We have been researching organizational learning as we build out NERCOMP’s new, intensive professional development program, designed to support you as you design and implement projects to improve learning in your organization. LOA premieres this July in Wellesley, MA, at preposterously low cost to you: if you’re interested, the enrollment pages will be opened on the NERCOMP site any moment now.

The Workplace Learning Survey: You may also like to take our provocative, associated Workplace Learning Survey; results of this survey will be reported on in the near future, stay tuned!

The Workplace Learning Road Show. For those who want to start to apply the lessons of workplace learning immediately, Collen, Gina, and I will come to your workplace and conduct a half or whole-day program with you and your colleagues that includes an introduction to the Organizational Learning literature, your own results on the Workplace Learning Survey, focused sessions on understanding your own culture and targeting areas of improvement, and sessions on surfacing individual and team-based belief systems. Write to me if this sounds fun.

Top Ten Lessons of Organizational Learning Research

10. Learning is key during times of change, yet organizations don’t learn well.

Everyone agrees that during times of change, the way to stay relevant is to learn, adapt, evolve. And we more or less have a sense of what it takes to do this—to significantly change our organization and its performance—it’s a big deal, yes, a three-year process, emotional, etc., but it can be done. That’s for changing once, though: retooling the production line to produce a new model, then just producing that model for a while.

The trick is that we’re now in an environment of constant change, so we need to forget the idea of alternating between periods of change and stability and design our organizations to be in a constant state of learning, of intentional, self-directed learning, and not just waiting for the world to intermittently force us to learn. It’s about managing a self-renewing learning ecosystem, not a factory. This kind of always-learning organization is a higher order of learning, a much more complex structure, involving sophisticated management that we don’t really know how to do.

Complicating the problem is that we’re not particularly good at even the old change-once model of institutional learning. People by default come to act in organizations according to Argyris’ “Model 1:” they protect themselves from vulnerability, defend their teams from external destabilization, they don’t share, and they don’t trust. Which all means they don’t learn well.

9. People develop

We used to think you stopped learning at around age 21, and that after that point (when formal education generally stopped, too), you pretty much just coasted. This idea has fallen from favor; recent leaps in brain science let us see that the brain is constantly linking neurons to neurons right up to the end; Robert Kegan’s research also shows that adults can grow in cognitive sophistication over their lifetimes, changing the way they see the world in deep, meaningful ways, becoming increasingly able to deal with complexity and ambiguity. Which is good, because we’re talking about the need to teach ourselves how to grow and manage sophisticated learning ecosystems.

The catch here is that many of our behaviors and cultural structures still assume you don’t really develop. Things that focus on changing behavior rather than mindset or belief system (like performance reviews or New Year’s resolutions) are an example: they assume you can consciously decide your way through life, while the truth is that to really learn you often need to grow your consciousness itself. Another example is the cookie-cutter way we tend to understand each other and our organizations: more as changeless and rigid caricatures and less as subtle ontological and epistemological structures in constant state of flux and growth. Don’t we often identify a job and then look around for who can do it? In a learning organization we’d probably do something more like identify a job and ask what we need to do to help someone to grow into the ability to do it.

Carole Dweck’s work is telling. Her research reveals that if you think of yourself as “fixed,” say, as in “good” at something, you will avoid situations that challenge you, because you fear you’ll discover that you are not good. However, if you don’t worry about whether or not you’re good, but you focus on getting better, and if continuous improvement is your identity, you’ll crave any situation, especially the challenging ones, that can help you improve. Succeeding at getting better is of course better than failing at remaining good.

Even an institution built on improving people sometimes misses the point. Take the university. Here we dump enormous resources into the development of students, but nothing (relatively) goes to develop the staff or faculty. But in an ecosystem every part influences every other part—investments in faculty and staff will help create a virtuous circle that lifts everyone.

8. People learn with loops and groups

Two very basic elements of learning can be summarized as “loops” and “groups.”

By loops we mean feedback loops. The basic learning cycle made famous by Kolb involves some planning, some action, some reflection, and then it starts over; this little sequence basically repeats itself in learning at a myriad of levels microcosmic and macrocosmic, in individual learning, and in team learning.

By groups we mean groups of people. Learning is a social happening (whether we think we’re alone or not). On the theoretical level Vygotsky’s famous Zone of Proximal Development sees in the social context the maximum growth potential of the individual. On the mundane it makes sense, too–clearly you can protect the vulnerability of learners and foster great conversations (important in forming loops!) when a small group of like-minded people are learning together.

An organization thinking about how it can improve its learning will thus likely spend a lot of time looking for places it can create feedback loops and add reflection to the ubiquitous planning and action cycles in the workplace. And when it’s not thinking about loops, the learning organization will be looking at its teams, how they function, how learning happens in them, and thinking about creating new learning teams or reinforcing existing teams.

7. Learning makes you vulnerable

One of the difficulties of learning in the workplace is that (as we saw above) we learn fast not to be vulnerable in the workplace. But learning requires you to be vulnerable. On a basic level in any cognitive domain you have to be a beginner before you can be an expert: yet the workplace is obsessed with expertise and the appearance of expertise—to be thought of as less than expert, or incompetent, is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to you.

The problem is compounded for a team learning to do something new—in what we call the “double incompetency” problem, if you’re shifting resources from the old thing to the new thing as you ramp up to produce the new behaviors, there will be a point where you are insufficiently doing the old and not yet expert at the new. You’ll be liable to be called incompetent in both areas. From a traditional production perspective you should be fired.

But from the learning perspective the incompetence is required, and not welcoming that incompetence would be more or less immoral. So a learning organization will have to deal with this tension—protect the learners by retooling their expectations and the environment’s expectations, etc. And a learning organization that is in continuous dynamic development will have to learn how to also be in continuous dynamic insufficiency.

6. Learning makes the unconscious conscious

The reason we hinted above that structures that expect you to change your behavior by willpower don’t work is that we all have deep belief systems—both on an individual and social level—that govern those behaviors. And if we want to behave differently (that is, if we want to learn), we have to adjust those belief systems. This is the thinking behind Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s work, and it emerges in Schein and Argyris as well.

You can change these belief systems, fortunately, and that is indeed the way we evolve through life: but to change them you need to “surface” them. You need to “see” the frame through which you saw the world, and in so doing you can make a new frame capable of handling more complex information. It requires a king of penetrating self-examination and honesty in conversation that we don’t normally see in the workplace, though. Kegan and Lahey evolved a process, “Immunity to Change” that can guide you and your team in this journey; for Schein, protected conversations in safe “islands” are required to get at these deep beliefs. In either case looking for places you have conflict with the expectations of others is not a bad starting place, and fortunately, that sort of conflict is rife in work, where all our assumptions are basically thrown together and jostled about daily.

I was invited to talk to a group of wonderful library, IT, and teaching and learning center staff at UMASS Boston in early December; they are thinking about new ways to organize their community liaisons, and they asked me for my two cents. I loved every minute of it; they were enthusiastic, engaged, reflective, fun. And here’s what I said, somewhat abbreviated.

When you look up the definition of liaison, you get what you’d expect. A person who interfaces between two organizational units to “ensure unity of purpose.” That makes sense. But I like some of the more obscure meanings of the word, too, like “any thickening for soups, sauces,” such as cream. Liaisons should see themselves as binders and thickeners. Liaisons, you are cream. Hold that thought.

I then worked with Lee Shulman’s definition of collaboration, as “a marriage of insufficiencies” (see “Communities of learners and Communities of teachers,” Mandel Institute, 2007, freely available online) and the well-known contrast in education thinking between collaboration and cooperation.

Cooperation, in my recap, is how you work together in a static environment. Your roles are defined, you basically perform consistently: you do things together that you don’t have to do together, you do them for convenience, and you don’t need to communicate much, because you all know your part. Collaboration, on the other hand, is the inverse. You do things together that you can only do with other people, because the goal is lofty, and none of you is sufficient to the task. It’s improv rather than reading scores, it’s sailing a boat in a storm rather than having a transaction at a bank window, it’s risky, it makes you vulnerable, you’re aware of and processing together all sorts of environmental factors and responding dynamically; there are feedback loops on top of feedback loops, and there’s a massive emphasis on communication.

I proposed four hypotheses related to collaboration and cooperation:

In an environment of change, collaboration becomes more important.

Collaboration is required for group adaptation.

Collaboration builds relationships.

Liaisons may be the best positioned to collaborate of all the people in the entire planet.

A brief explanation of these: I decided that in our fluid, changing environments, we have to collaborate to be successful, that that collaboration is the only way to get a group of people to do something differently, that it’s the best way to build relationships with peers (because you have to have each other to survive), and I suggested that it’s the role of the liaison, in particular, to effect collaboration. Because the liaison is by nature half in and half out of the group. Relationships–a tying-together kind of thing, in other words, a thickening of the soup, bringing us back to the cream idea. N’est-ce pas?

Some notata bene I felt it important to add:

Collaboration is politically vulnerable.

Collaboration works best in a community that appreciates it.

Confusion about when cooperation or collaboration is more appropriate freaks people out.

Collaboration takes a lot of time. And the groundwork is invisible. And it’s occasionally hard to explain.

Collaboration (and learning in general) is anxiety provoking.

Collaboration builds on cooperation and is a ground for it.

Explanation: basically collaboration comes at a cost: being highly unstable, political unwise, and anxiety-provoking; we should not jump into it without knowing the costs. The best of all worlds is when your enlightened boss, school, organization know(s) what it means to collaborate and unleash(es) you to do it, with all that it will consequently entail for you and them, including lots of short-term inconveniences, because they want the long-term payoff.

Another two points I think worth making. First, it’s probably wrong to contrast these two approaches, which really need each other. I can’t really collaborate if we haven’t been cooperating or if I can’t subsequently evolve that collaboration into a cooperation.

Second, every organization at any given moment should be running some mix of collaboration and cooperation. Lean towards cooperation in the calm periods. Lean towards collaboration in the crazy periods. Whatever the case may be, it is important that everyone on the team knows what that mix is, and who is doing what. As a kind of natural collaborator, I see all the time the quite remarkable stress caused when peers assume I should be cooperating, and I’m collaborating. If you’ll have a particular person do one or the other, it would be good to let everyone know it, and to know the ramifications thereof, and to say a blessing on them.

As a tantalizing concluding device, I’ll leave you with this little association table I concocted–eight, arbitrarily chosen, other ways of expressing the same sort of dichotomy I develop here between collaboration and cooperation: